Formaldehyde (CH 2 O) is an important tracer of tropospheric photochemistry, whose slant column abun-dance can be retrieved from satellite measurements of solar backscattered UV radiation, using differential absorption re-trieval techniques. In this work a spectral fitting sensitivity analysis is conducted on CH 2 O slant columns retrieved from the Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment 2 (GOME-2) in-strument. Despite quite different spectral fitting approaches, the retrieved CH 2 O slant columns have geographic distribu-tions that generally match expected CH 2 O sources, though the slant column magnitudes and corresponding uncertainties are particularly sensitive to the retrieval set-up. The choice of spectral fitting window, polynomial order, I 0 correction, and inclusion of minor absorbers tend to result in the largest mod-ulations of retrieved slant column magnitude and fit qual-ity. However, application of a reference sector correction us-ing observations over the remote Pacific Ocean is shown to largely homogenise the resulting CH 2 O vertical columns ob-tained with different retrieval settings, thereby largely reduc-ing any systematic error sources from spectral fitting.